Super Mario Kart put Mario and his friends behind the wheel and changed racing games for good. The Super NES title mixed karts, items and shared multiplayer screens into a package that still holds up as a model for the genre.
The Setup
Super Mario Kart puts eight characters from the Mario series on karts. Players race across courses arranged into four cups, each built around a theme, moving from the first cup through to the last.
Items drive the action. Smooth peels, swift boosters, stars and the green and red shells give weaker racers a chance to catch up and strong racers a reason to stay watchful. The other racers stay close no matter the difference in skill, which keeps races tight, sometimes too tight for players who want a race decided purely on skill.
Battle Mode and Shared Screens
Battle Mode lets a pair of players face off in closed arenas, popping round shapes with items instead of racing for position. It is a simple idea, but it gave the game a second life outside its main racing mode.
Shared racing for two players on one screen was rare for consoles at the time. Super Mario Kart made local multiplayer central to its design, not a small extra placed on the side.
Handling and Courses
The handling model favors drift over traction, and it takes practice to get used to. Once mastered, the controls reward accuracy, particularly on the tighter courses found in the last cup.
Course design differs in quality across the 20 tracks. Some remain well liked for their design and shorter paths that reward wandering away from the main path. Others feel more like an early idea than a fully built racing setting, a fair exchange for a game creating its own form as it went.
Where It Stands
Judged against what came after it, Super Mario Kart set several standards the series and the genre still follow:
- Karting built around characters with their own personalities
- Items that balance skill and chance
- Battle Mode as its own multiplayer form
- Shared local racing on one screen as a core feature
- Cups arranging tracks into themed groups
The Numbers
- Platform: the console made by Nintendo known as the Super NES
- Genre: kart racing
- Cups: 4
- Tracks: 20
- Multiplayer: shared screen for two players, Battle Mode included
- Critical score for this review: 7.4 of 10
The racing mode built for a single player can repeat itself once every cup is cleared, since the other racers rely on staying close rather than changing strategy. The Mode 7 graphics technology, used to imitate depth on the track, was striking at the time but looks plain by later standards. Sound design serves its purpose, with a soundtrack that supports the pace of each track without doing much beyond that.
Super Mario Kart is not a perfect racer. Its influence is greater than its rough edges, and it remains pleasing to play today largely because the core mix of items, drift and shared disorder on the screen was right the first time. Score: 7.4 of 10.
